“What?”

  “That someone would convert my bed into a robot that would fight other bed robots to the death for me.”

  That startles a laugh out of me. “That would be pretty awesome.”

  A slow, shy smile spreads across his mouth. “And we could take bets on them. And be filthy rich.”

  I lean my head against the frame of the stall, looking at the tile wall and the pattern of yellowed cracks there, and grin. “I take back anything I might have implied to the contrary. Sam, you are a genius.”

  * * *

  I’m not good at having friends. I mean, I can make myself useful to people. I can fit in. I get invited to parties and I can sit at any table I want in the cafeteria.

  But actually trusting someone when they have nothing to gain from me just doesn’t make sense.

  All friendships are negotiations of power.

  Like, okay, Philip has this best friend, Anton. Anton is Lila’s cousin; he came down to Carney with her in the summers. Anton and Philip spent three heat-soaked months drinking whatever liquor they could get out of the locals and working on their cars.

  Anton’s mother is Zacharov’s sister Eva, making him Zacharov’s closest living male relative. Anton made sure that Philip knew that if Philip wanted to work for the family, that meant he was going to be working for Anton. Their friendship was—and is—based on Philip’s acknowledgment that Anton’s in charge and Philip’s ready to follow his lead.

  Anton didn’t like me because my friendship with Lila seemed to come without acknowledgment of his status.

  One time, when we were thirteen, he walked into Lila’s grandmother’s kitchen. Lila and I were wrestling over some dumb thing, banging into the cabinets and laughing. He pulled me off her and knocked me to the floor.

  “Apologize, you little pervert,” he said.

  It was true that all the pushing and shoving was mostly an excuse to touch Lila, but I’d rather get kicked around than admit it.

  “Stop it!” she screamed at Anton, grabbing for his gloved hands.

  “Your father sent me down here to keep an eye on you,” he said. “He wouldn’t want you spending all your time with this deviant. He’s not even one of us.”

  “You don’t tell me what to do,” Lila told him. “Ever.”

  He looked back down at me. “How about I tell you what to do, Cassel? Get down on your knees. That’s how you’re supposed to act in front of a laborer princess.”

  “Don’t listen to him,” Lila said stiffly. “Stand up.”

  I was starting to rise when he kicked me in my shoulder. I fell back onto my knees.

  “Stop it!” she yelled.

  “Good,” he said. “Now why don’t you kiss her foot? You know you want to.”

  “I said leave him alone, Anton,” said Lila. “Why do you have to be such a jerk?”

  “Kiss her foot,” he said, “and I’ll let you up.” He was nineteen and huge. My shoulder hurt and my cheeks were already burning. I leaned forward and pressed my mouth to the top of Lila’s sandaled foot. We’d been swimming earlier that day; her skin tasted like salt.

  She jerked her leg back. Anton laughed.

  “You think you’re in charge already,” she said, her voice trembling. “You think Dad’s going to make you his heir, but I’m his daughter. Me. I’m his heir. And when I am the head of the Zacharov family, I won’t forget this.”

  I stood up slowly and walked back to Grandad’s house.

  She wouldn’t talk to me for weeks after, probably because I’d done what Anton told me instead of what she’d said. And Philip went on like nothing had happened. Like he’d already chosen who he cared more about, already chosen power over me.

  I can’t trust the people I care about not to hurt me. And I’m not sure I can trust myself not to hurt them, either.

  Friendships suck.

  * * *

  I look at the clock on my phone on my way to the car and figure that I better head home if I want my grandfather not to notice how long I’ve been gone. But I have one more stop to make. On my way out to the car, I call Maura. She’s the final ingredient in my plan: someone to answer the prepaid phone if it rings.

  “Hello?” she says softly. I hear the baby crying in the background.

  “Hey,” I say, and let out my breath. I was worried Philip would answer. “It’s Cassel. You busy?”

  “Just trying to clean some peaches off the wall. You looking for your brother? He’s—”

  “No,” I say, maybe a little too fast. “I have to ask for a favor. From you. It would really help me out.”

  “Okay,” she says.

  “All you have to do is answer a cell phone I’m going to give you and pretend that you’re the receptionist at a sleep center. I’ll write down exactly what you have to say.”

  “Let me guess. I have to say that you can go back to school.”

  “Nothing like that. Just confirm the office sent over a letter and that the doctor is with a patient but he’ll call them back. Then call me and I’ll handle the rest. I don’t think it will even come to that. They might want to verify the office really sent out the letter, but that’s probably it.”

  “Aren’t you too young to be living a life of crime?”

  I smile. “Then you’ll do it?”

  “Sure. Bring over the phone. Philip isn’t going to be back for an hour. I’m assuming that you don’t want him to know about this.”

  I grin. She sounds so normal that it’s hard to recall a sunken-eyed Maura perched at the top of the stairs, talking about angels. “Maura, you are a goddess. I will carve your likeness in mashed potatoes so all can worship you like I do. When you leave Philip, will you marry me?”

  She laughs. “You better not let Philip hear you say that.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Are you still? I mean, does he know?”

  “Know about what?”

  “Oh,” I say awkwardly. “The other night. You were talking about leaving—but, hey, I guess you guys worked things out. That’s great.”

  “I never said that,” Maura says, her voice flat. “Why would I say that when Philip and I are so happy?”

  “I don’t know. I probably misunderstood. I gotta go. I’ll be over with the phone.” I hang up, my hands slippery with sweat. I have no idea what just happened. Maybe she doesn’t want to say anything over the phone, in case people are listening. Or maybe someone’s there—someone she couldn’t talk in front of.

  I think of Grandad saying Philip was working her, and I wonder if I misunderstood. Maybe she really doesn’t remember what she said, because he hired someone to take those memories from her. Maybe she doesn’t remember lots of things.

  Maura opens the door when I ring the bell, but only partway. She doesn’t invite me in either. Unease roils in my stomach.

  I look at her eyes, trying to read something from them, but she just looks blank, drained. “Thanks again for doing this.” I hold out the phone, wrapped in a slip of paper with directions on it.

  “It’s fine.” Her leather gloves brush mine as she picks up the cell, and I realize she’s about to close the door. I stick my foot in the gap to stop her.

  “Wait,” I say. “Hold on a second.”

  She frowns.

  “Do you remember the music?” I ask her.

  She lets the door fall open, staring at me. “You hear it too? It started just this morning and it’s so beautiful. Don’t you think it’s beautiful?”

  “I’ve never heard anything like it,” I say warily. She honestly doesn’t remember. I can think of only one person who’d benefit from her forgetting to leave her husband.

  I dig around in my pocket and take out the memory charm. Give this to remember. It looks like an heirloom, something that might be passed on to a favored daughter-in-law to welcome her to the family. “My mother wanted you to have this,” I lie.

  She shrinks back, and I remember that not everyone likes my mother. “Philip doesn’t like me to wear charms,” she says. “He says a worker’s wife shouldn’t look afraid.”

  “You can hide it,” I say quickly, but the door’s already closing.

  “Take care of yourself,” Maura says through the sliver of space that remains. “Good-bye, Cassel.”

  I stand on the steps for a few moments with the charm still in my hand, trying to think. Trying to remember.

  * * *

  Memory is slippery. It bends to our understanding of the world, twists to accommodate our prejudices. It is unreliable. Witnesses seldom remember the same things. They identify the wrong people. They give us the details of events that never happened. Memory is slippery, but my memories suddenly feel slipperier.

  * * *

  After Lila’s parents divorced, she got dragged around Europe for a while, then spent several summers in New York with her father. I only knew where she was because her grandmother told my grandmother, so I was surprised to walk into the kitchen one day and see Lila there, sitting on the counter and talking to Barron like she’d never been gone.

  “Hey,” she said, cracking her gum. She’d cut her hair chin length and dyed it bright pink. That and thick eyeliner made her look older than thirteen. Older than me.

  “Scram,” said Barron. “We’re talking business.”

  My throat felt tight, like swallowing might hurt. “Whatever.” I picked up my Heinlein book and an apple and went back to the basement.

  I sat staring at the television for a while as an anime guy with a very large sword hacked up a satisfying amount of monsters. I thought about how much I didn’t care that Lila was back. After a while she came down the stairs and flopped onto the worn leather couch next to me. Her thumbs were stuck through holes in her mouse gray sweater, and I noticed a Band-Aid along the curve of her cheek.

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  “To see you. What do you think?” She gestured to my book. “Is that good?”

  “If you like hot cloned assassins. And who doesn’t?”

  “Only crazy people,” she said, and I couldn’t help smiling. She told me a little about Paris, about the diamond her father had bid on and won at Sotheby’s, which was supposed to have belonged to Rasputin and given him eternal life. About the way she’d had her breakfast on a balcony, drinking milky cups of coffee and eating bread slathered with sweet butter. She didn’t sound like she’d missed south Jersey very much, and I couldn’t blame her.

  “So, what did Barron want?” I asked her.

  “Nothing.” She bit her lip as she pulled all that pink hair into a sleek, tight ponytail.

  “Secret worker stuff,” I said, waving my hands around to show how impressed I was. “Ooooh. Don’t tell me. I might run to the cops.”

  She studied the warped yarn around her thumb. “He says it’s simple. Just a couple of hours. And he promised me eternal devotion.”

  “That spends well,” I said.

  Worker stuff. I still don’t know where they went or what she did, but when she got back, her hair was messed up and her lipstick was gone. We didn’t talk about that, but we did watch a lot of black-and-white caper movies in the basement, and she let me smoke some of the unfiltered Gitanes she’d picked up in Paris.

  Poisonous jealousy thrummed through my veins. I wanted to kill Barron.

  I guess I settled for Lila.

  7

  I GET BACK TO THE OLD house in time for dinner, which turns out to be goulash of some kind, thick with noodles and dotted with slivers of carrot and pearl onions. I eat three plates and wash it all down with black coffee as the cat winds around my ankles. I hand her down all the beef I can nonchalantly pick out.

  “How’d the doctor’s visit go?” Grandad is drinking coffee too, and his hand shakes a little as he brings the cup to his lips. I wonder what else is in the cup.

  “Fine,” I say slowly. I don’t want to tell him about the test or about Maura and her missing memories, but that leaves me with very little to say. “They hooked me up to a machine and wanted me to try and sleep.”

  “Right there in the office?”

  That did sound pretty unlikely, but there’s no backing down now. “I managed to doze a little. They were just trying to get some basic results. A baseline, he said.”

  “Hu-uh,” Grandad says, and gets up to clear the dishes. “That must be why you were so late.”

  I pick up my plate and walk to the sink, saying nothing.

  Later that night, when I’m covered with dust but most of the upstairs is clean, we watch Band of the Banned. On it, curse workers who belong to a secret FBI team use their powers to stop other workers, mostly drug dealers and serial killers.

  “You want to know how to tell if someone’s a worker?” Grandad asks with a grunt. He’s saved the chair I hate and is sitting in it, his face lit with blue from the screen. The hero of the show, MacEldern, has just kicked down a door while an emotion worker makes the bad guys weep with remorse and begin a rambling confession. It’s pretty lame, but Grandad won’t let me change the station.

  I look at the blackened stumps of my grandfather’s fingers. “How?”

  “He’s the only one gonna deny he’s got powers. Everyone else thinks they got something. They got some story about the one time they wished for a bad thing to happen to someone and it did, or wished for some moron to love them and got loved. Like every goddamn coincidence in the world is a working.”

  “Maybe they do have a little power,” I say. “Maybe everyone does.”

  Grandad snorts. “Don’t go believing that crap. You might not be a worker, but you come from a proud worker family. You’re too smart to sound like—wasshisname—who said that if kids took enough LSD, they’d unlock their powers.”

  One in a thousand people is a worker, and of all of them, 60 percent are luck workers. People just want to game the odds. Grandad should understand that.

  “Timothy Leary,” I say.

  “Yeah, well, see how that turned out. All those kids trying to give each other the touch, winding up half out of their heads, imagining they’d worked and been worked, imagining they were dying from blowback, clawing each other apart. The sixties and seventies were stupid decades, full of misinformation and crazy rock stars trying to be prophets, pretending to be workers. You know how many workers were hired just to do the work Fabulous Freddie said he did alone?”

  There’s no point in trying to distract Grandad from his rants once he’s gotten started. He loves them way too much to bother realizing I’ve heard them about a million times before. The best I can hope for is to push him toward some new rant. “You ever get hired by one of them? You would have been, what, twenty-, thirtysomething back then?”

  “I did what old man Zacharov said, didn’t I? No freelancing. Know some people who did, though.” He laughs. “Like a guy who toured with Black Hole Band. Physical worker. Really good. Someone pissed off the band, that someone’d be in traction.”

  “I would have thought emotion work would be more popular.” Despite myself I’m drawn in. Usually when he delivers this speech, I feel like he’s giving it to the rest of the family and I’m just overhearing it. This time we’re alone. And I think of all the stuff I’ve seen photos of on the Internet or on VH1 specials from back then. Performers with goat heads, mermaids who danced in tanks until they drowned because the transformer hadn’t known what she was doing when she’d cursed them, people remade like cartoons with big heads and huge eyes. All turning out to be the work of a single transformation worker who died of an overdose in her hotel room, surrounded by worked animals that stood on two legs and spoke gibberish.

  There aren’t any transformation workers for bands to hire to do any of that today, even if it was legal. There might be one in China, but no one’s heard about him for a long time.

  “Well, no one can work a crowd. Too many people. There was this one kid who tried. He figured what the heck; he’d ride out the blowback. He’d let a whole crowd of people touch him, one after another, and make them feel euphoric. Like he was a drug.”

  “So the blowback would be euphoric too, right? Where’s the harm in that?”

  The white cat jumps onto the couch next to me and starts shredding the cushions with her claws.

  “See, that’s the problem with kids—that’s how you all think. Like you’re immortal. Like all the stupid things you’re doing, no one ever thought of before. He went crazy. Sure, drooling, grinning, happy crazy, but crazy all the same. He’s the son of one of the bigwigs in the Brennan family, so at least they can afford to take care of him.”

  Grandad goes off again on his rant about the dumbness of kids in general and worker kids in specific. I reach over to pet the cat and it quiets under my hand, not purring, just going still as stone.

  * * *

  Before I go to bed that night, I root through the medicine cabinet. I take two sleeping pills and fall asleep with the cat at my elbow.

  I don’t dream.

  * * *

  Someone’s shaking me. “Hey, sleepyhead, get up.”

  Grandad hands me a cup of too strong coffee, but this morning I’m grateful for it. My head feels like it’s packed with sand.

  I reach for my pants and pull them on. My hands automatically tuck in the pockets, but halfway through the gesture I realize something’s missing. The amulet. Mom’s amulet. The one I tried to give Maura.

  Remember.

  I go down on my knees and crawl under the bed. Dust, paperback novels I haven’t seen in years, and twenty-three cents.

  “What are you looking for?” Grandad asks me.

  “Nothing,” I say.

  * * *

  When we were little, Mom would stand Philip and Barron and me next to each other and tell us that family was everything, that we were the only people we could really rely on. Then she would touch our shoulders with her bare hands, each in turn, and we would be suffused with love for one another, suffocated by love.

  “Promise your brothers that you will love one another forever and ever and that you will do whatever you have to to protect one another. You will never hurt one another. You will never steal from one another. Family is the most important thing. There is no one who will love you like your family.”